http://www.jewishworldreview.com --Black Rock Desert, Nevada
Meet the new counterculture. Andrew Heintz, 25, and his
girlfriend Amy Joe Alstead, 26, have, as the police might put
it, no fixed address. But for a homeless couple, they're very
middle class. After a couple of years of hard work and
saving, Andrew closed a lucrative carpentry business and
Amy quit her job as a preschool teacher. They have sold their
house in Minneapolis, Minn., paid all their bills and their credit
cards, and bought a year's worth of health insurance. Now,
towing a pickup truck and canoe behind their RV, they've hit
the road. Their first stop is the annual spectacle known as the
Burning Man project, held in Nevada's Black Rock desert in
the week leading up to Labor Day.

In Andrew's words, Burning Man is "an art festival for
pyromaniacs." That's because the week culminates in the
ritualistic torching of the large wooden dummy that gives the
event its name. But Burning Man is both more and less than
that. It has a reputation for being popular among Silicon
Valley types, but attendees represent a somewhat wider
swath of young urban professionals, most of them from the
San Francisco Bay area. They pay $100 apiece for the
privilege of camping on a playa 120 miles north of Reno. This
year's Burning Man attracted some 24,000 people, most of
them from the San Francisco Bay area.

There is a lot of conceptual talk at the event-of Burning Man
as an analogue to the Internet, with lots of ad hoc
"communities" springing up; of the joys of non-commercialism
(no money is supposed to change hands after arrival). It is a
slice of the sort of Americana beloved of NPR's All Things
Considered–well-educated people with a penchant for
self-dramatization doing strange things in an out of the way
place. There are night clubs, musical performances, theme
villages, fashion shows, and talent contests.

One fight-like
spectacle, named Thunderdome after the Mad Max movie,
uses elastic pulleys to swing people holding foam-wrapped
weapons into each other to do battle. Most sites are less
ambitious, like Wimminbago camp, which as far as I could tell
consisted of a Winnebago, a sign that read "Got ovaries?" and
a half-dozen or so topless, overweight, and rather butch
lesbians. Walking around Burning Man, you might wonder if
you've stumbled into a mass audition for NEA grants. Artists
erect various postmodern structures all over the
four-square-mile area of the camp; flame-throwers belch
forth; people paint their nude bodies and dance. Despite the
festival's oft-repeated slogan–"No Spectators"–a sort of
equilibrium has been achieved: About half the people are
either naked or costumed, and the other half are watching
them.

But for all the highfalutin talk, it's hard to avoid the obvious:
The counterculture remains, as it has always been, a sort of
shell game. It's considered bad manners to say so, but the art
is often just decoration for a lot of sex and drugs. In an
informal survey taken by Burning Man's "Ministry of
Statistics," 60 percent of female respondents and 20 percent
of male respondents said they had taken drugs in the last 24
hours. Sculptor Ray Cirino, whose "water woman" was on
display, is in this sense emblematic of Burning Man, since he
is perhaps more famous for multi-colored feather sex toys,
which grace a 13-page spread in the October issue of
Penthouse magazine.

Burning Man was started in 1986 on Baker Beach in San
Francisco by Larry Harvey, at the time a depressed
37-year-old landscape gardener. He and some friends were
burning stuff, including an 8-foot-tall wooden figurine, with, it
seems, no particular mission in mind. According to the lore
that has grown moss-like around this moment, people on the
beach came running over to watch, leaving Harvey convinced
that there was a need out there for some kind of ceremony
like this. It became a "project." The organizers refer to it as an
"experiment" and describe its aim as "radical self-expression."

The more fanatical participants call it a temporary utopia.
They write down wishes on pieces of paper and burn them
with the man. They talk about discovering themselves. It's
radicalism circa high school: They want to "break down the
barriers" that separate people in the "normal" world; they
express themselves and celebrate what the "normal" world
would prefer they repress; they want to show each other
kindness and generosity, bringing to life an ideal community.
They want, in short, to do a lot of drugs, preferably someone
else's. The utopia is what pop psychology calls a "positive
environment," promoting and affirming the members' bad
habits.

Still, there is something charming about a guy like Andrew
Heintz, who is neither a social misfit graduating from the
identity-warping games of the Internet nor a completely
respectable professional atoning for an otherwise conventional
and bourgeois existence. His light, bluish eyes give him the
look of a wild man as they peer out from his sunburned face.
Balding prematurely around a widow's peak, he has yellow
blond hair that hangs long in the back and, except for the
rounds of firecrackers he has taped along the brim of his
brown leather hat, he looks like he could have just stepped
out of a daguerreotype of cattle ranchers.

Before dropping out, Andrew bought an RV. A few years
back, he says, he wasn't sure if he could live on the road, in a
world without mortgages, income tax returns, and
two-bedroom homes. Burning Man, however, convinced him
he "didn't need a permanent address." Bravo, David Mayers
would say. Mayers, a radio host on the NPR affiliate in the
Silicon Valley area, is hanging out at a camp called the
Laughing Sex Institute, pet project of his friend, 48-year-old
Steve Penny, who works as a hiring consultant to high-tech
firms in Silicon Valley. According to Mayers, forgetting where
you live is exactly what you should do. Mayers is upset that
there is so much techno music at Burning Man. There should
be "African music," he says, "that makes everyone forget their
name and address." And where, he wants to know, is the
Islamic music? The people at Burning Man are "desert
nomads. . . . Why don't we hear the chanting of the Koran? .
. . Where are the ouds?" Ouds, he explains, are the "lutes of
the Islamic world."

Mayers would have been happy to learn that, even without
African music, Robert Cardinelli, a 32-year-old bartender
from Dallas, Texas, found a way to get lost immediately upon
arrival. He "made a beeline for the port-o-potties, forgot to
make any markers" to help him identify where he had parked,
"and got lost, 24-hour lost," without food or water. He started
out drunk, and then came across a hit of acid. It was,
however, a sad trip: All the while, his "favorite teddy bear was
locked in the car." This is Cardinelli's second trip to Burning
Man. The first was "somewhat interesting, somewhat
spiritual," he says. "I put to rest my ex-wife." She's dead?
"No, put her memory to rest." This year, he came in order to
overcome a drinking problem. It was only his second day
there, but already he was speaking of it as a failure. "Did I
accomplish that?" he asks. "Not really." At this point, a friend
hands him binoculars, saying "Look out on the playa, there's a
girl out there. She looks about 16, but she's hot." The next
afternoon, with the desert heat bearing down, I see Robert
stumble by, drinking a fifth of scotch straight from the bottle.

The idea that you can reinvent yourself at will is a modern
notion; in its postmodernism, Burning Man proceeds from the
idea that you were invented to begin with. Any personal
characteristic–sexual bent, character trait, religious belief–is
only a choice away from being something totally different.
Many attendees assume "playa names" for the duration, like
"Evil Pippie" and "Maid Marion," to name just two. Of
course, the pressure to find a new self in just days can take a
serious psychic toll. At one theme camp, where the point was
to tell jokes, a young man walked up and fell apart when the
crowd asked him to tell one, too. "Wait!" he screamed. The
two girls he was with giggled as if this was the joke. "It's got
to stop." Staring at his companions with a look of violent
disbelief, he continued, "No, stop–you must stop!" His voice
full of self-pity and, it seemed, real anguish, he went on,
"People tell me who I am and . . . I can't take it. It's got to
stop. I have no ego. I have no id . . . " Two volunteer rangers
came over and, smiling sweetly the whole time, asked him to
come with them.

The identity problem of the counterculture is not exactly a
small one, nor is it even a problem according to some. Last
year, in Time magazine, R.U. Sirius, a writer who has made a
career as a high-tech impresario, drew a straight line from the
false identities of the old multi-user-dungeon games on the
Internet and the identity-changing experience at Burning Man.
The new counterculture, he argued, is made up of "bright
young pagans," "the computer-programming,
anthropologically aware polymaths who have popularized the
imaginative role-playing bulletin boards of cyberspace." The
new counterculture's philosophy, Sirius explained, opens up
"temporary autonomous zones" in which completely original
identities are formed.

But only a bright young pagan could mistake a group of
people running away from themselves for seekers of
self-knowledge. The identity problem of these young rebels is
the narcissism of small cosmetic differences. What the
oh-so-hip Sirius calls "postpolitical tribalization" is actually the
superficial vanity of tiny social cliques who fear that, without
visible markers, strangers might mistake them for another
equally self-absorbed clique.

The culture of Burning Man is rather a direct descendant of
the '70s awareness movements that sought a "new
consciousness." In The Culture of Narcissism, his study of
the post-liberation left, Christopher Lasch attacked
awareness movements for projecting patients' insecurities and
shortcomings onto society at large. Lasch would have found
the scene at Burning Man familiar, despite the fact that it is the
product of a more opulent time. "I didn't go through
adolescence until my twenties," I overheard one young
woman say. The awareness movement, according to Lasch,
reflected a common failure among otherwise educated and
self-sufficient adults to overcome the adolescent's inclination
to see the outside world as a reflection of his own needs and
wants.

The narcissist . . . cannot live without an
admiring audience. His apparent freedom from
family ties and institutional constraints does not
free him to stand alone or to glory in his
individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to
his insecurity, which he can overcome only by
seeing his "grandiose self" reflected in the
attentions of others.

Thus the deep problem when a culture of narcissism endures.
Eventually, everyone becomes an attention hog and nobody
pays attention to anybody but himself.

This attitude, of course, bespeaks childishness of a high order.
So it's perhaps unsurprising to read in the promotional
material on the official Web site that the appeal of Burning
Man is, "You're not the weirdest kid in the classroom." And
it's unsurprising that the politics of Burning Man, such as they
are, are also a bit adolescent. Burning Man founder Larry
Harvey has a commercialization rant that could sit nicely
beside any beatnik or hippie screed against culture for the
masses. "You remember breakdancing?" Harvey asked (with
accidental hilarity) in an interview with an online publication.
"It was immediately appropriated and turned into a fad and an
article of consumption so that within the span of a mere three
or four years the younger brothers and sisters of the
break-dancers who would've been emulating them and adding
to that tradition now perceived it to be a consumer item that
was no longer available to them: it had been exploited,
commodified and turned into a source of entertainment." Yes,
at Burning Man commercialization is much inveighed against;
in fact, monetary exchange, with only a couple of exceptions,
is a violation of community. Barter is the main form of
commerce on the playa, a rather sacred principle it seems,
except that I heard more than a couple of people use the
phrase "cash barter."

And the self-expression is a bit reminiscent of high-school
literary magazines: "I can be free, I can be naked [which she
was], I can be fat, I can be gay," says a young lady who
asked not to be identified since she was there with a man not
her husband. "You can just be whatever it is you need to be,
today." The urge to try on new identities isn't as strong,
however, among those who come to watch. "Shelter for lost
girls"–one sign hanging off the side of an RV reads–"massages
for the ladies." Another camp hoists a banner advertising a
free drink to female attendees who would show their
"panties," and two free drinks if they aren't wearing any. Such
old-fashioned lechery seems like a pinnacle of self-knowledge
compared with the new-age expressive nudity that Burning
Man ostensibly celebrates.

A couple of guys describe for me two entrants in a "talent
contest." The performers went on stage and, well, did the
nasty. I asked John Dailey, a 29-year-old environment expert
working for a mining company in Nevada and a first-time
attendee, what he thought about that. He responded with a
huge smile, "What do you think I thought of that? It was
great." Still, for a guy who knows cheap thrills when he sees
them, John is completely taken in by Burning Man. It is, he
says, "an evolutionary miracle that we've progressed enough
intellectually to put together a society like this, for even just a
week, that's made of pure good karma." Everything else, he
says, is "f–up." Not that John isn't trying to help: He is
organizing, he told me in the vaguest terms, a "meeting next
month in Reno" for influential and open-minded citizens to talk
about "what society should look like 200 years from now."

Except for people like John, a true believer but also a happy
spectator, the people at Burning Man seem divided into two
groups: exhibitionists and voyeurs, those looking to express
themselves and those looking to watch. Among newcomers,
those who came to watch easily outnumber those who came
to be cleansed and purified by the flames of the Burning Man.
Which makes one wonder if the 60 percent increase in
attendance over last year (when only some 15,000 people
showed up) isn't, in large part, attributable to increased
publicity about the cheap thrills to be had for a mere $100.

The organizers seem to be onto this aspect of Burning Man.
A release form I was asked to sign when I arrived said,
"Producer agrees not to broadcast any footage featuring
individuals engaged in sex acts or drug use," both of which,
clearly more than the art, have made Burning Man "a legend,"
as one first-timer describes it. Such is the counterculture: one
excuse-making factory run into the ground only to be
replaced by another. Now it's Burning Man's turn to deny that
decadence is the reason for the season, when it is plain as day
to the guys who took photographs for their private
collections. Purely dirty minds always get the better of
pretentious dirty minds.

Having spent the better part of a week in the desert among
naked people, I have come to several conclusions. One,
perhaps the ugliest thing in the world is a naked man riding a
bicycle. Two, any nudist who claims not to be an exhibitionist
is just a lying exhibitionist. Three, and most important, public
nudity strips loveliness of any love. As Othello says of
Desdemona, "She has eyes, and chose me." Laying one's
beauty down in the public square makes impossible such a
choice; it is to prefer the eyes of many and to offer one's
beauty to all in common. Thus does the beloved rob the lover
of his treasure; once it is theirs, it is his no more.

On the last night of the festival, Andrew Heintz and his
girlfriend Amy Joe Alstead are starting a bonfire. Using a
design he traced from a children's model, Andrew has built a
wooden dinosaur that stands over 15 feet tall. Someone
shows up with a video camera to capture the moment on
tape. Andrew, a natural stage personality, has an easy
awareness of where the camera is.

Using six sheets of plywood, one pound of grade B
fireworks, and a quart of kerosene, he explains, "we are going
to sacrifice this dinosaur to the gods of wind and dust." By the
time the structure is moved into a safe area of the playa,
Andrew has amassed an audience of about 90 people. While
stuffing the gut of the dinosaur with cardboard strips, he
works the crowd, saying things like, "If you have marijuana or
any hallucinogenic drugs, you should come find me in ten
minutes." When the fire starts, there are about 150 people
standing around, some of them writing down wishes and
dropping them into the flames.

I got out a notepad and wrote down my wish: to be returned
to the "normal
world."